The idea that Nature favours the ubermenschs and overdogs, that 'Might is Right' , were pretty well universally accepted, albeit sometimes resignedly, in 1939.
Henry Dawson, drawing much different conclusions from his decade long study of the constantly varying battles of Human-Bacteria Commensality, certainly didn't agree.
He gave at least equal odds to all the untermenschs and the underdogs of our natural slash human world.
His ideas were pretty outre with his fellow scientists and his fellow human beings in 1929 ......or even in 1939.
And remained so until about 1943, when the repetitious failure to have 'The War' go anywhere near the direction the various overdogs would have it go, caused many people around the globe to look at the maxim 'Might is Right' in a more jaundiced light.
Dawson never changed his mind - but eventually the World did, thanks to WWII's unexpected off-coursedness.
The War's end found the World feeling much less Modern and feeling much more post all that sort of stuff - a position that has only grown stronger in the world, in the seventy or so years since Dawson's premature death in 1945.
I can only hope the irony amuses Dawson, wherever he is right now ....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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